Maybe she wouldn’t have been stolen in the night if she and her father had closed the kitchen window and set the alarm as they made their nightly rounds after family prayers.

And maybe her ordeal wouldn’t have lasted so long if somebody — anybody — had just spoken up after seeing a veiled teenager who didn’t seem to have a will of her own.

Those are the first three paragraphs of the CNN story. Are they actually insinuating that the parents share some, or most, of the blame? The article actually goes on to discuss that even more. Disgusting.

As for speaking up about the “veiled teenager”, oh, wait, look, someone did

Mitchell began to speak of going to California for the winter, and in August they walked to the library for maps. Someone called the police, saying Elizabeth Smart might be at the library. The caller said he thought he recognized her eyes.

Former Salt Lake City homicide detective Jon Richey was sent to investigate. Although he considered the lead “a long shot,” he asked, repeatedly, to lift the young woman’s veil. But Mitchell said it violated their religious beliefs for anyone but the young woman’s husband to see her face.

Richey testified that it would have violated her civil rights to lift the veil if the story about her religious beliefs was true. And Mitchell’s calm demeanor didn’t set off any alarms for him. He said that when he learned about six months later that the girl he’d tried to question was Smart, it left him “traumatized.”

That was a mere two months after Elizabeth was kidnapped, back in August 2002, a time less than a year after 9/11, when the liberal media, from local all the way to international, along with Good Little Liberal dhimmis, were beating the drum about anti-Islamism, throwing out their standard litany, racism, bigotry, diversity, hatred, cries for tolerance, and so on.

Upon questioning the trio, Detective Richey asked the man (who we now know to be Mitchell) if he could look under the young girl’s burqa. Mitchell vigorously claimed that to expose the girl’s face would violate their religious beliefs. No matter how many times Richey asked to see the girl’s face, Mitchell stood fast, claiming that there would be “serious religious consequences” should the girl’s face be exposed to anyone but her husband. He also told the detective that their religion forbids women from speaking in public.

The post is possibly the best article written about what led to Detective Richey failing to lift that veil, which I would highly recommend reading the entire thing. As the writer, David Stein, writes, no blame should be placed at Richey’s doorstep: he was simply following the rules and regulations put in place by the Utah lawmakers, revolving around HB 101

For several years, Utah Democrats in the statehouse — specifically Rep. Duane Bordeaux (at the time Utah’s only black legislator) — had been pushing for an “anti-racial profiling” bill. The Democrat-proposed HB 101would combat “racial profiling” by Utah law enforcement by creating a master database of the race and ethnicity of every single Utah law enforcement officer, and the race and ethnicity of every single person he or she stopped in the course of an investigation. Every officer would be monitored to ensure that they weren’t stopping “too many” minorities.

It’s these types of laws that lead to criminals going free, and 14 year old girls from being rescued, as law enforcement officers are put into untenable positions. And it is these types of laws, and all the left wing hang wringing and panty wetting that continues to put our nation and people at risk from Islamists. This is why Grandma Wendy from Wichita, who is so white bread that she brings home baked muffins for the TSA screeners, is groped due to the underwire in her DD bra.